Blogging Thoughts

[jimhines]

I’ve been blogging in one form or another for about 20 years ago. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, it was LiveJournal and hand-coded a Geocities website, mostly to post my daily wordcount and talk about progress on the novel with a handful of other newbie and wannabe writers. (I even remember my old Geocities website address!)

That’s a lot of blogging. I vented over legal struggles (behind a tight friends-lock) back in the early 2000s. I bemoaned my rejections and celebrated the occasional short fiction sale. I talked about diabetes and depression. As I developed an audience, I also became more aware of fandom and of the larger SF/F scene, and wrote more about that. I argued and vented at folks — often justifiably, but not always. I celebrated stories I enjoyed. I talked about harassment and discrimination and inclusion and the ongoing struggle to make my genre more welcoming to those who have been historically excluded. I posted cat pictures and made memes of book covers.

I haven’t been blogging as frequently this year. Partly, that’s because I’ve had to focus more on the fiction writing — first revising Terminal Uprising, then writing ProjectK in three months before trying to get started on the third Janitors book. I have a few smaller contracts and deadlines coming up as well.

But I also find myself hesitating sometimes because I feel like I’ve already talked about a given topic. Sure, I could write about the underlying racism and hypocrisy of Robert Silverberg’s criticism of N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo win and speech, but do I have anything new to say that I haven’t said a dozen times before? Or I could talk about the frustration that even after 13 published novels, I still get stuck trying to plot out the next one, but I’ve written about my writing and process so many times, aren’t we all tired of it?

And I’m realizing I’m wrong about that. Just because I’ve written about something before doesn’t mean everyone’s read it. (How arrogant would it be to assume everyone’s read the entire archives of my blog?) Hell, some of you people weren’t even alive when I wrote my first LiveJournal post!

I wrote something on Twitter last night about how I wrote and published a lot of books before I even considered quitting my day job. This got a number of responses, which surprised me at first — it’s hardly the first time I’ve talked about that.

Our audience, our community, is constantly changing. And it’s not about always having something new and unique to say. Sometimes it’s about participating in the conversation. Sometimes it’s about trying to offer counterpoints and balance to the nastiness.

I’m still struggling with the planning for book three, so I can’t guarantee a flood of new blog posts. But I’m going to try to stop chucking possible posts and topics just because I might have talked about them before.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Comments

[martianmooncrab]

in a way, its "still alive, still writing"

[zeeth_kyrah]

The world is full of ideas, but stories are a puzzle, not one idea only. Putting it together is like building a puzzle where the pieces have moving pictures -- could you imagine that in Harry Potter's world? And all you know is that it should look like a scene you'd want to put yourself in (if only vicariously), one that's "a bit like this picture here."

[coth]

It's not just audiences who change. You aren't the same person you were when you last talked about whatever, and you will say different things from a different perspective.

I once tried to explain life to a tweenager as being like climbing a spiral staircase. What there is to see as you climb doesn't change, but where you see it from and how you see it does.

[duskpeterson]

You said what I was about to say. I've seen and enjoyed the occasional post by you during the last few years but only began regularly following your blog recently. (And I began posting at LiveJournal in 2005.) So anything you post is likely to be new to me. I'm glad you're continuing your blogging; I was afraid this was going to be an announcement that you were hanging up your hat as a blogger.

Now go work on your fiction, which is the important thing. :)

[ravens_quill]

This is really encouraging to hear. I feel like I silence myself online so much more now than when I was younger because I think either 1. I've already talked about this subject to death, or 2. I don't have anything new to say that someone else hasn't already said (and more eloquently/succinctly). I need to remind myself that even if the subject is the same, I am not.

[mental_mouse]

For any given subject, if you feel like "you've been over the ground before", but you want to bring it up again, you could always do a roundup of your posts on that subject, perhaps rescuing a few posts from old platforms.